CEO Insights Magazine

Thanks to the massive penetration of cheaper and high speed internet connectivity, India is one of the largest and fastest-growing digital consumers across the world. Starting from day-to-day activities to education and payment, the country has truly embraced digitalization and is digitizing faster than the majority of the world. While many players and brands are competing against each other in the Indian digital payment sector, it’s the Bangalore based digital payments and financial technology company PhonePe that has stood out among its peers. In this journey, as a Head of Engineering, Radhakrishna R, has always focused on building a long-term robust technology required to boost the digital App brand.

In an exclusive interview with CEO Insights, Radhakrishna shares about his overall professional experience, his future roadmaps planned for PhonePe and much more:

Give a brief account of your professional journey so far
After my Engineering in Computer Science and Technology in 2010, I joined Motorola and primarily worked in backend development. My love for working on products that I can associate myself deeply with combined with the booming of the overall mobile application development ecosystem made me join the bandwagon and focus on Mobile Engineering including both iOS and Android platforms. As the journey progressed, there was a gradual increase in mobile consumption and transaction and presently, most of the transaction and content based applications are mobile only apps. As part of the journey, I joined SAP and worked in mobile application development before joining RedBus. Later, I also worked at Hike Messenger for a while, and for the last four years, I have been with PhonePe since 2018. The transition to PhonePe happened largely due to the realization that compared to larger organizations, I could have a better impact in a smaller organization.

Could you enlighten us about PhonePe’s impact and presence across the technology, information, and internet space in the country?
Starting in 2016, the growth of PhonePe as an organization in the last six years has been phenomenal, which was also on the back of the fact that we wanted to provide financial inclusion for the masses. We are focused on building an open platform for all Indians while making sure that we are the transactional App for the masses that pivots on payment, which is also something reflected in our vision statement. Through out the journey, I have been able to look very closely at how technology can be used to bring this sort of transformation. Along the journey, PhonePe has become the number one UPI player in the transactional space surpassing Google Pay in early 2021, and is also leading the race in terms of transaction and value on UPI. Our focus on building robust technology has been the underpinning of all these successes.

Tell us about the vital lessons you have inculcated from your previous career experiences and how you find them helpful in your current role and operations.
There are a couple of vital lessons that I have inculcated from my previous career experience. From the technology perspective, I have learned to focus on building long-term robust tech solutions right from day one instead of focusing on short term fixes. The same is also the secret behind our success at PhonePe as we envisioned a solid longterm tech product as our first product that is capable of scaling.

From a people perspective, I have learned the value of having a good organizational structure. Putting together teams that are capable of high performance and achieving goals is something that I got the chance to build very early in my career. It’s about bringing different perspectives into the team and having people with varied thought processes. Instead of having everyone agreeing to one point, have a good mixture of people in a team and then structure it in a way that each individual has a high degree of

autonomy and accountability at work.

What are the goals you wish to achieve in your future roadmap? What would be your advice to individuals stepping into this space?
Coming to the short term plans, as the mobile development technology, which is hardly been around for 12 to 13 years, is at a very nascent stage, I am working on taking up challenges in mobile development, evangelizing it, and building a community to cater to mobile application development. In this quest of mine, I am also reaching out to different engineering leaders in the ecosystem and trying to build a network that focuses on mobile development technology.

Coming to long term goals, my goal is to make sure that the integration of technology with consumer product building is seamlessly done while focusing on improving the tooling and expertise around it. I also want to establish myself as someone who can bring in product thinking and merge that with consumer application development.

From an engineering perspective, the advice I would like to give to individuals is to put themselves in different engineering roles and challenges from an early stage of their career. Start figuring out the aspects that you connect with at an early stage of your career as the later stage will be more about doubling down on your strengths. From a product building perspective, my advice would be to figure out what a customer needs. Be more connected with the customers or individuals and make sure that their pain points are understood before building the product.

Radhakrishna R, Head of Engineering, PhonePe
A seasoned software professional with around 12 years of overall experience working with many reputed firms such as SAP, RedBus and Hike Messenger, Radha krishna is presently working as the Head of Engineering at PhonePe. A result oriented engineering leader focused on building and mentoring large teams, Radhakrishna has been working closely in Mobile technology throughout his career and believes in developing longterm and robust technologies instead of fulfilling shortterm goals.